Did you spend money today on things you didn’t need? Maybe you’re addicted to cigarettes and bought a pack of cigarettes? You’d have to put that under things you don’t need because you don’t need the cigarettes technically. Your life won’t end if you don’t smoke. Far from it smoking can lead to your early demise. So maybe you bought a pack of cigarettes for $3.00. Then maybe you bought a pack of gum for $1.99, a bottle of soda for $1.00, a snickers bar for $1.00, another soda for another $1.00. You get the picture. Money adds up. $10 dollars wasted per day at 365 days is $3650.

Even if you have an issue with saving for the proverbial rainy day, lets say you’ve been wanting to buy a big screen TV for a good few years but you just can’t ever seem to find an extra $1500. Saving up for a TV for an entire year might seem like an eternal age of saving to you, but if you look at it like this, you’ve been wanting the TV for a few years but still don’t have it because the money just isn’t falling from the sky no matter how long you wait. If you’d been saving just half of the $10 you spend every day on things you didn’t need to buy, you could have already purchased the television set. Of course it’s just a TV and could also be classified under spending money on things you don’t need; but the point is, you’d have had the option to buy the TV if you’d forgone the chewing gum, the snickers bar and the two sodas.

When you spend your money on unneeded things, like snacks bought not because you’re hungry but because you were walking pass a vending machine and saw the snacks and figured “why not?”, you’re pretty much just going over to the company you’re buying from and putting your money in their pocket as if to say you know they love money and you don’t have any use for money so they can have yours and you’ll just take the snickers bar. What can you do with a snickers bar other than eat it and then expel the residue as waste?

Low income and poor people don’t tend to think of money in terms of saving and stretching and growing. When they get their hands on money they tend to spend it. They live with so much deprivation that any extra money they get their hands on goes to buy things they had to do without while they didn’t have the money. It’s the reason so many of the poor people who win the lottery, for example, end up poor again. They don’t really understand the value of money, not because they’re a bunch of fools, but because no one goes into poor communities to educate the poor about the value of money. For some reason, it’s thought that only people who have money need information on how to manage money and how to make money multiply. It’s assumed poor people are poor because they’re stupid. Being uninformed doesn’t make you stupid. One isn’t stupid who doesn’t understand what someone is saying who is speaking in a language with which they are not familiar. One simply doesn’t understand and would need to learn the language or else the speaker needs to speak in a language the listener understands.